Omar Richardson

applied mathematician and chief technology officer at simula research laboratory

My name is Omar Richardson. I am an applied mathematician and chief technology officer at Simula Research Laboratory.

Simula is a Norwegian research institute that focuses on technological innovations in IT that help solve problems in society. Affiliated with the Department of Applied AI, I am mostly involved with industrial R&D through artificial intelligence, such as computer vision and natural language processing. This blog has two main purposes:

All views on this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my current or past employers.

Profiles

  • 0mar
  • Omar Richardson
  • Omar Richardson


    • Other interests

    Multiscale systems

    I obtained my PhD at Karlstad University, Sweden, under supervision of prof. dr. Adrian Muntean. My PhD research focused on describing transport and interactions of populations. Simply put, I look at large groups of particles, which can represent anything from pedestrians to molecules, and I try to express their behaviour in mathematical terms. If you are able to represent a situation in formulas or algorithms, it becomes a lot easier to analyse and predict. Most of my work is done in the context of crowd dynamics: the study of people in motion, interacting with each other and their environment. I did some work on evaluating evacuation strategies in buildings and large outdoor scenarios, and making new models that try to capture important elements in evacuation scenarios (like smoke and fire).

    I dealt with the numerical analysis of these systems, as well as tackling obstacles in the computationally demanding simulations. From the mathematical formulations I built simulations that capture the situations as accurate (and fast) as possible. This involves combining continuum systems with particle systems, which I researched in my MSc project, parallelising computations to increase scalability, and applying multiscale modelling techniques to compartmentalise transport and interaction.

    For a more detailed, non-technical introduction of my thesis topic, listen to this podcast.

    Computer networks

    Together with dr. Johan Garcia (Karlstad University), I investigated how to find patterns in internet traffic that distinguish regular browsing from activities like streaming or downloading. In order to anticipate high-intensity internet traffic but maintain user privacy, we are developing machine learning methods to identify and predict internet traffic properties from encrypted data streams. This allows internet service providers to anticipate changes in traffic and improve their quality of service. Our latest work, A Novel Flow-level Session Descriptor with Application to OS and Browser Identification has been presented at IEEEs Network and Operation Symposium (NOMS) in April 2020.

    Biography

    I was born and raised in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. I studied Applied Mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. In August 2016, I moved to Sweden to pursue a PhD at Karlstad University in applied mathematics. In May 2021 I defended my PhD (see Publications). In September 2021 I joined Simula Consulting in Oslo, Norway as data scientist. I became CTO in late 2023, and kept that role after the integration of Simula Consulting and Simula Research Laboratory.

    Questions, discussions or ideas for collaborations are very welcome! You can find my contact details here.